I guess it’s an analogy that has been in my mind for a while. Rubists are often quite eager to distance themselves from the legacy of Perl. But, the connection is very strong to me. In terms of design goals (programmer happiness), and over all feel (sigils, context variables, infix conditionals) and there’s quite a bit more I could point out.

In fact, many Perl developers where saying things like, “Ruby until Perl 6” not long ago. The difference between two (i.e. Ruby and Perl and similarly Scheme and Common Lisp) IMHO is that Ruby has as an additional goal of wanting to be simple and elegant (which I would say similar to Scheme in contrast to CL).

Whereas, the aesthetic Perl has always been after was programmer productivity and happiness even at the expense of having the capacity to look like line noise. As a result it’s got everything and the kitchen sink sometimes at the expense of apparent elegance (which seems similar to CL in contrast to Scheme).